


set aside forever (the kind and shining things)

by TolkienGirl



Series: Fixing on the Hour - Vignettes [7]
Category: Fixing on the Hour - TolkienGirl, Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Genre: Adolescent Trauma, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, But she's trying, Darcy doesn't cope very well with...anything, F/M, Gen, Parent Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-03-01 01:55:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13284465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: “I don’t get drunk,” Bing says, as she sprawled on Darcy’s bed. “It seems sloppy, and…unkind. To me, and to everyone else. Why don’t you?”Darcy regards her blankly. “Because I cry when I’m drunk,” she says, and then her expression closes like a book. - search wide for heaven





	set aside forever (the kind and shining things)

One supposes—or one might suppose, in a fictional realm never quite belonging to Darcy—that she has other relations.

And she does. There is an aunt in California, and there are grandparents—but only until she is thirteen. There are cousins in New England, and there are people who very much _wish_ they could claim relation, like her insufferable godfather.

There are Fitz’s parents, who have been kind and altogether bumbling.

There is, thankfully, Fitz.

 

When Darcy remembers her grandmother, she thinks of a teaspoonful of scotch, slipped to her after dinner. Her grandmother was a scrap of a woman, sharp-eyed and quick-witted. Her son Kenneth surpassed her in both size and patience.

At seventeen, Darcy stares down into amber depths, and remembers.

 

She wouldn’t call it a drinking problem. She drinks out of anger and because she _wants_ to, not because she must. Maybe it helps her sleep at night when George has cried himself to sleep against her shoulder. Maybe she goes downstairs in their house—still, dreadfully, it is _their_ house, for all that they have aunts and cousins who insist on staying—and Darcy drinks.

She drinks until the world goes softer at the edges. Soft as it can never be in the harsh truth of daylight.

The world sways. She cries, but not like George cries.

 

And because Kenneth Williams was a lawyer, and because he taught his daughter so much ( _so much_ ), and because he is dead—

Well. Let it simply be said that the aunts and cousins do not stay forever.

 

Fitz, though.

Thankfully, Fitz.

 

(When she and Fitz are ten and twelve years old, they sneak into her dad’s office and drink something hard and nasty and expensive. They can only make it through a mouthful.)

(Fitz is the one who says, _you have to stop this_ , when she is sixteen and he is eighteen and she is as hard as ice and just as quick to go soft and watery at the edges when George is out of the room.)

(She told Fitz, when she was ten, _I’m going to be a lawyer_ , and Fitz, to his everlasting credit, said, _I know_.)

 

She is seventeen, and she is drunk in front of George once.

Only once.

(She stops.)

 

Someday, the wall will break and Darcy will lie flat on her back again, staring at a turning ceiling and murmuring, _come back, come back, come back_.

Someday, she will press cold, weeping glass to her forehead again.

Someday, she will let herself hate them and love them. For now, she wraps them in all the cold marble that memory can give, and sets them on a pedestal she would have to reach to touch.

 

“I don’t want to be like him,” Eli says. So they keep it to a glass of wine each, or maybe a beer for him. Just once in a while.

And Darcy presses her cheek against his shoulder, links her fingers through his. And thinks,

_Like me._


End file.
